


muscle, blood, miracle

by klickitats



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Angst and Fluff and Smut, Body Worship (if you squint), Desk Sex, F/M, Oral Sex, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Scars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-19
Updated: 2015-03-19
Packaged: 2018-03-18 13:58:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,789
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3572213
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/klickitats/pseuds/klickitats
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Is it scars?” he tries. “I’m covered in scars. Everyone is. Do you—” His turn to blush. “Would such a thing, ah, curb your desire for me? </p><p>“No,” she snorts. “I—Andraste’s sodding <em>blood.</em>” </p><p>Or, the Inquisitor is nervous about what lies--or doesn't lie--under her clothes, and Cullen loves her for it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	muscle, blood, miracle

His fingers aren’t trembling— _his fingers aren’t trembling_ —that’s all Cullen can think when he starts undoing the long row of buttons that begins at the collar of her fine shirt. The glow of adrenaline, the heat that grows in his belly, the heady darkness of her eyes silence the lyrium in one fell swoop. He’s hunched over her, spread out on the desk, licking into her mouth like he’s trying to find a way home. There are three different doors that could all open at any moment but it matters so little. Let them come. Let them see—he is free.

Cullen knows she isn’t a miracle, knows she is just _Trevelyan_ and she is a woman, as he is just a man. But this thing, this spark—it is a miracle.

“Stop,” she says. Cullen hears it faintly, and then her hands touch his gloved ones. “Stop.”

His hands freeze immediately. “I’m sorry,” he says, almost stuttering. “We don’t have to—this is too fast.”

Trevelyan props herself up on her elbows. Her gray eyes blink—she looks lost, like she doesn’t know what to say. “No,” she says. “It’s not—not too fast. You just—it’s not what you think.”

He blinks, opens his mouth. “I mean to say,” Trevelyan says, flushing a little, “I don’t look—under this. I don’t look…like you expect. It’s not—” She clears her throat. “Not good.”

Cullen remembers her long Marcher legs striding through the snow, the strong bend of her back in the wind. Thinks of the grace in her arms as she practices her staff with Dorian, the way a drop of sweat runs down her neck and disappears beneath the collar. How many times he has strained himself not to tuck a curl of her black hair back behind her ear? The way she curls up in the dragon maw throne in the great hall. Her silhouette against the stone of Skyhold.

He found her lying on one of the eaves overlooking the courtyard once, stretched out in repose. Jacket abandoned, only in a linen shirt and trousers. Every sinew languid and pliant under the bright mountain sun. The sight haunted him for _weeks._

“There is nothing,” he says quietly, entwining her fingers with his, “that could make me not want you.”

“But you don’t _know_ ,” is her reply, frustrated. “Tell me,” he murmurs in response, his thumb soothing the inside of her wrist with soft strokes. He likes how smoothly the leather moves against her skin.

“Is it scars?” he tries. “I’m covered in scars. Everyone is. Do you—” His turn to blush. “Would such a thing, ah, curb your desire for me?

“No,” she snorts. “I—Andraste’s sodding _blood._ ”

He kisses her nose. “We don’t have to. Not until you’re ready.” She shakes her head, reaches up and begins undoing the buttons with harsh, quick movements. _I want to do that_ , murmurs the heat of Cullen’s blood. _Let me, let me—_

“I had—a sickness,” she says, not looking at him, fumbling with buttons. Her fingers are trembling. Cullen wants to kiss them, soothe the shaking away. “Ten years ago—no one in my tower could heal it with their magic. They tried—they brought someone in from Tantervale, if you can believe it.” Her laugh is high, nervous.

Cullen opens his mouth to reassure her but she goes on. A button flies off; the sound of it bouncing on his floor is jarring. He murmurs her name.

“I had these—hard lumps. Growths, like stones of flesh. They had to cut them out. They were poisoning my blood. I lost my…my shape.”

Cullen, a man fluent in the awkwardness of language, can spot a euphemism at a hundred paces. When her fingers shake too hard to unbutton the next on her shirt, he stills them with his own gloved ones. “We don’t have to,” he reminds her. “You decide. I can wait.”

“I want to,” she bites out. “That’s the problem. I want to. I want _you_ , been thinking about it for ages. Every time—” The blush on her tanned cheeks is intoxicating. “Every time I come in here I just want to scale up that ladder and lie in your bed. Wait for you. Keep you warm.”

He kisses her then, an echoing flush climbing up his neck and ears as the heat coiled inside him _sings_ high and tight through his limbs. The thought is nearly enough to do him over.

“Let me,” he murmurs. His voice is dark and soft, edged with something sweet. “Please.” It makes her shiver, like the tones are fingertips running over her skin. He presses warm, open-mouthed kisses along her neck, tracing her pulse with his tongue as his gloved fingers make quick work of the rest of her buttons. Her breath hitches; with a bit of wiggling he deposits her shirt on the floor.

A hand runs through his hair and tugs up— _oh,_ that’s never felt good before—making their eyes meet. Her soft gray eyes blink once, twice.

“Say it again,” she murmurs. Her thumb traces his bottom lip. Somehow, the aching trust on her face points him to the right words.

“Nothing,” he kisses the pad of her fingertip, “would part me from you. Nothing,” the tip of his tongue presses, licks, and her eyes widen, “can make me leave.”

She arches up, sliding her arm behind her. She undoes her breastband, pulls it off, and—

She has no breasts. Scars twine and carve across her flesh, blooming from the center and reaching out soft, faded tendrils. Less than he might think for such a surgery, such a procedure.

He is somewhere between spellbound and silent. The breastband drops to the floor, soft padding inside.

“I’m not ashamed of them.” Her voice is quiet, calm. “I just…I never know what someone is going to think. What someone will _do._ ” She runs a hand over her face. “I don’t know.”

 _It’s hard to be vulnerable_ , is what she doesn’t say. Cullen can understand that.

She rests her forearm over her eyes, silent—Cullen assumes she waits for his words, and he has none. Words are inane at a time like this; he is action, challenge, a forward march.

He breathes once, twice, and then his golden head dips to press his lips to the center blossom of a scar.

Her eyes fly open—she gasps. The first time she gasps for him, Cullen notes with almost-glee. He slides his hands under her back, leather on skin, making her arch. He tongues his way along a soft vine of tissue. Gentle, tasting the flesh, the salt of her skin, the sweet ridges of _life_ —she is alive, her skin sings, to breathe and fight and blush and give him long side-eyes in the war room when he bickers with Josie. To lie under the sun like a cat, to chase dragons and stand down the Fade itself.

He is a dedicated man; he traces each one. She trembles under him, but it’s not from fear, not this time—her body hums with sweetness under him. She tugs his hair with a firm hand—his breath hitches, and he knows she notes the bob of the apple in his throat. She drags his mouth to hers and they kiss until his knees are weak.

There are no more words. Cullen hates words, most of the time—they get in the way, hide meaning like a shadow. He could say, _you are beautiful_ , and he suspects he will one day—when he remembers how to speak. But now, he is in awe of the miracle of her flesh—these scars that mark her better than any quill _alive, alive, alive._

He moves down her body, hooking his fingers into trousers and smallclothes and sliding them off her strong legs. He sinks to his knees as though he was built for no other purpose and frames her hips in his gloved hands, kissing them. _Lost my shape_ , she had said. She is nothing but whole. Glorious, complete, and whole.

She rises up on the edge of the desk so she can see him, her fingers mussing his golden hair when he parts the lips of her cunt. The soft, wet flesh begs to be touched, quivers when he runs a thumb down the slit. And he sinks into her, like a man resigned to drowning, the ecstasy of the wind and the wave.

He circles her clit with his tongue and her thighs shake—she moans his name, _Cullen, Cullen_ and he stores that away too, unworthy man that he is. She tastes like salt from a sweet sea and it makes no sense, but it’s somehow everything. A long lave of his tongue makes her fall back onto her elbows, and when he presses inside her, nose grinding against her clit, slow strokes of his tongue pressing in, and out, and in, and—he hears the back of her head thump against the desk.

Her hips writhe with surprising strength and he holds her down. She yanks at his hair— _Maker_ —and he has reduced her to broken gasps and moans that slide along his blood, running straight to his cock. She moans his name, appeals to the Maker, until he has reduced her to nothing but _oh, oh, please, please_ —

It is better than music. He will never stop clamoring to hear it. This is the kind of talk he can do—his tongue stroking notes of intimacy into her flesh, her voice moaning a soft symphony in return. He sucks her clit between his teeth and she comes, a wordless cry that makes the hairs on the back of his neck stand at attention. Never has a sound taken root in him so. He groans, lapping at the wet—he could say, _I am yours_ and suspects he will soon enough, but this is better, to take everything someone is and drink it down, make it part of you, keep it close to your blood so it will never leave.

He rises, sliding back up her body, hands stroking up pliant curves. Presses his lips a scar at her chest, the mark that bisects his lip touching the ridge of her flesh. Perhaps that’s what’s most intimate of all—these stitches that keep them bound and whole touching, becoming one, just for a breath. She tugs at his head—she knows it’s a weakness now, and he can’t help but grin. Perhaps one day she will say to him, _you are mine_ —he can only hope—but this, the heat of her mouth as she pulls him under, this is better.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> tumblr: klickitats


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